There's fire in Irons yet

Although 'magnetically sexy' on screen, he has a reputation for being cold and arrogant in person. Now 53 and with his latest film about to open, which is the real Jeremy Irons? He speaks to Angela Lambert

SO here he is at last, this internationally successful English actor with a reputation - rare indeed among English actors - for being magnetically sexy on screen. I have caught an early plane to Dublin, where he is attending a Beckett film festival. I am not looking forward to this encounter since, according to previous interviewers, he is reserved, stiff, controlling and controlled, fastidious, obsessive, enigmatic, melancholy, ruthless, arrogant and contemptuous. Above all, time and again, he is described as cold.

Jeremy Irons: 'Recently Sinead went through a stage of saying, "I've got to have a face-lift", and I said, "Don't you dare, because what's in you shines out of your face" '

He greets me unobtrusively in the crowded hotel lounge - no big entrance, no strut and flourish - with a kiss on both cheeks, although we have never met before. At first sight he is smaller, thinner, shorter than I had expected - perhaps a little under 6ft. As he lopes up two flights of stairs, he leads the way to his suite where he offers champagne and smoked salmon and, despite my protest, insists on signing the bill. Beneath the apprehension, I am also curious. My daughter had groaned with envy on hearing that I was going to meet Jeremy Irons. How would I respond? Would I find him sexy? Racing heart, dry mouth, unable to control the tremor in my hands?

Having made sure that I have what I need - comfortable chair, place to rest my notebook ("Good to see you writing . . . I'd love to have been a writer"), wine and pungently oaky smoked salmon - he finally settles himself full-length on the sofa. His suede-shod feet are draped elegantly over one end; narrow, sculpted head pillowed comfortably on a pile of cushions at the other. He has unusually dark eyes and their piercing gaze is quite disconcerting.

How, then, to begin a conversation with this famously "arrogant" man? Talking to someone about their childhood often knocks down their defences, so I ask how he felt when, at the age of seven, he was sent from an idyllic childhood in the Isle of Wight to prep school, and from there to Sherborne.

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"I remember about a week of misery when I first arrived but after that I got through it by learning the strategies for survival in an alien environment. I learned to go with the flow and live quietly. I made my own little routine, my own boltholes, which allowed me to get through the rest. I wouldn't say it damaged me exactly, but it formed me emotionally and made me what I've become . . . someone who chooses to step outside a structured society, who has a great desire to leave behind its formal, rather hierarchical rules. Now, if I meet people from my schooldays, I feel 30 years younger than them.

"I had no desire to act at school, but when I didn't do well at A-level I applied to four drama schools, got in to Bristol Old Vic, and began to turn my emotions back on. Hitherto my father [a chartered accountant] and I had been rather stand-offish - we were both men and men didn't touch. A manly handshake - a clasp on the shoulder - that was all. I remember embracing him for the first time. I must have been 20 and I'd never done it before. After that, for the last 15 years of his life, thank God, we had a really close relationship. By the end I felt a sort of soul-wrenching love for him. It wasn't the same for my mother . . . I can say that now because they're both dead. I think she sent me and my brother away to school so that she could enjoy life and be free during term-time, as, to be fair, most middle-class mothers did."

He is candid, modest and amusing. This could have been - no, was - the practised charm of a man who has been interviewed hundreds of times since first stepping on stage with the Bristol Old Vic in 1968. For the next 30 years he was rarely out of work. After Godspell at the Round House in 1971 (where he met his second wife, Sinead Cusack) he did a stage apprenticeship in the classics with the RSC.

I ask about the rewards of being an actor. "It's the thing of losing myself. But in front of a film crew - it's like stripping in public - you have to be able to dare to do it. I never used to walk down a street without being aware of myself. As an actor I had to lose that sense of watching myself and reach my emotion bank or memory bank . . . Acting is odd because it's half you and half this character you're playing. Part of me would like to lose myself completely and go whither I know not but, sadly, I find it very hard."

It was obvious from early in his career that the camera loved Irons' saturnine good looks, and a certain elusive quality of danger underlying his well-mannered, deep-voiced Englishness. From the age of 30 onwards, the list of his starring roles is so well-known that it hardly needs rehearsing . . . Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited and, released simultaneously in 1981, the French Lieutenant with Meryl Streep. With these he made his name, and the following year he chose - surprisingly - to play a Polish worker in Moonlighting; then, in 1984, the name part in Swann in Love; then the distasteful, ambiguous Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune (1990). In Damage, he was the obsessed MP in love with his son's fiancee (Juliette Binoche). By 1993 Irons had barely been off the stage or screen for 25 years.

But in 1996 he took a gamble. As part of an attempt to make the transition from romantic lead to harder, uglier roles, he agreed to play Humbert Humbert in Adrian Lyne's re-make of Nabokov's Lolita. He caused uproar with the remark: "Some child abuse victims go on to have a perfectly happy life." Irons remains defiant over his decision to make the film - "I'm not ashamed of having done it" - but the film was never distributed in the States. "Americans are obsessed with political correctness, no one would hire me," he says - and for the next three years he scarcely worked.

As he gazes at me soulfully I realise that his charisma resides in those troubling eyes, soft yet resonant voice and expressive body language. His glass remains untouched but he smokes three or four Panatellas as we discuss the invasive and capricious nature of fame. He reminds me that Tom Stoppard said it simply means more people know you than you know. If you are famous, Irons believes, strangers lay claim to you, not as a friend, more aggressively than that: almost as if they owned you. The famous must maintain a faade of friendliness, accessibility, modesty. The public believes that it makes celebrities almost at random and it can break them, too. Thus, he says, the famous can never be private, bad-tempered, hungover; above all they can never be alone. One celebrity magazine recently featured telephoto pictures of Irons in a Paris cafe with "an unknown woman", kissing her goodbye on both cheeks - as the French do. The prurient implication was clear: a new woman, a secret affair.

In spite of all this, Jeremy Irons' marriage has lasted nearly 25 years. For a man who once said "Passion should always overturn things" it is quite an achievement. His respect for his wife is obvious. He freely admits that she's cleverer than he is and just as good an actor. Although she has had to spend time at home bringing up their two sons, they have survived as a couple - how?

"We both try not to be around when the other is working. We've never wanted to be an inseparable stage couple, but have always enjoyed the privacy from each other that our acting careers give us. It means that when we are together we're really together." Sinead - unmade-up and casual in black jeans and a T-shirt - hovers in the next room as we speak, answering the phone and summoning him from time to time with a wifely "Darling . . .?" Together they seem easy, close, trusting.

Irons continues: "Sinead had a complicated relationship with Cyril [her father, the actor Cyril Cusack] but she's come through that and blossomed and it shows in her face and her aura. She is more beautiful now, at 53, than she was when I first met her. In her twenties there was a prettiness but it was vapid. Recently she went through a stage of saying, 'I've got to have a face-lift,' and I said, 'Don't you dare, because what's in you shines out of your face.' "

He makes no attempt to disguise his age either (he is 53). His black hair is greying at the temples; there are lines around his eyes and the face is more gaunt than ever, but his frame has not thickened or grown paunchy, probably because he skis and sails as often as possible. I keep asking myself, "Is he sexy?" but although his directness is attractive, I don't detect the smoulder beneath the charm. Yet, increasingly, I find myself warming to him.

How much has the fact that his career is presently stalled have to do with being over 50? Growing older is a greater handicap for some actors nowadays; we give our stars 20 years of adulation while they're young, after which there's a real danger that we'll lose interest. Jeremy Irons is at that critical stage. In his new film, Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy adventure for children, timed to open over half-term, he plays the evil Profion, out to destroy the Empress and rule in her stead.

It's a far cry from the young Charles Ryder, the patrician von Bulow or the self-destructing MP in Damage, when, in filming one of the more violent sex scenes, he got so carried away that Binoche, deeply shocked, burst into tears. Irons must worry that his career could be on the cusp.

"I have no regrets at all about the way my career has gone, though I am frustrated at the moment because I can't raise the budget I want on a couple of movies, and by the lack of work about. It's a sort of fallow period for me, probably because I've been doing the castle for the last three years and therefore not searching for work. The castle has been even more of a task-master than the movies."

"The castle" does not - as I thought - refer to his Kafka film, but to Kilkoe Castle, a near-ruin he bought in County Cork. Irons says that his recent absence from films is due to the time and effort he has devoted to its renovation. He not only supervises the work - as a keen carpenter, he does much of it himself. Despite his lanky frame and sensitive hands he enjoys rough, physical pursuits. Next week he'll be sailing the New Zealand to Sydney stretch of the BT round-the-world race. He also hunts and rides fast motorbikes.

Two hours had passed; the interview was over. We relaxed. He told me his son - reading English at university in Dublin - was stuck over a 5,000 word essay. "Ah!" I said. "There's a simple technique to essay-writing that I learned when I was 17." When the photographer came in to set up his lights, Irons asked if I'd come downstairs where Sam was waiting and show it to him.

Which is how Your Reporter came to be ensconced on a sofa in the lobby of the Shelbourne Hotel last week, flanked by Irons Senior on one side, Irons Junior on the other, both listening intently to the Lambert rules for infallible essay-writing. Cold . . . reserved . . . arrogant . . . stiff? Not at all. I found him utterly endearing.